


snowfall

by nine_minutes



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Feelings, MSR, Snow, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:22:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28058373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nine_minutes/pseuds/nine_minutes
Summary: The snow was falling over Alexandria, softly padding the dark morning hours outside of his apartment.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 3
Kudos: 34





	snowfall

The first snow of the season was falling quietly over Alexandria. Large, downy flakes floated lazily through the dark hours of the morning, clinging to bare tree branches and stoplights and the last tips of grass waiting to be blanketed until spring. There is something ethereal about snowfall in the city, with its ambient sights and sounds of living padded safely away, if only for awhile. It is untouched and still, stoic and comforting; a soft moment for restless souls. It's an aching, impermanent beauty, and Fox Mulder liked it. 

The hazy orange glow of the sodium vapor streetlights filtered through the blinds of his bedroom window, slicing shafts of dim light through the darkness. Beside him, bundled messily in the sheets - his sheets - his partner. His lover? Somehow, conventional descriptors always felt inadequate for her. She defied pedestrian definition, really. She challenged him. Fascinated him. Deliciously overwhelmed him. She cuts him open and lays him bare, defenseless, exhilarated, drunk on an intimacy he'd never dreamed of, much less deserved. He can't help himself: he reaches out and lightly brushes an amber strand from her cheek, lingers longer than he should, savors the contact of rough fingertips on soft skin. He almost regrets it when she stirs, coos, and burrows deeper into their nest of covers. She's like the untouched snow: delicate, undisturbed, deserving of respectful and distant awe. Ephemeral. 

He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, his late night canvas of fears and hopes and worries and desires. He wants to freeze this moment in time, hold it, protect it; protect her. This life, his crusade - she joined him by choice. She opened herself up to extreme possibilities. She would follow him to the ends of the earth if he asked, and she already has, more times than he cares to account for himself. She deserves better than this. He swallows the last thought, closes his eyes and locks it away.

Love, he thinks, is unique in its vulnerability. First, there is a compromise of self in the joining of two souls; passions and weaknesses interlock, support, clash - intertwine into one another until beginnings and ends are blurred. It's red and blue becoming purple, equal hands in the creation of something new, and exciting, and scary, greater than the sum of its parts. This he has accepted - welcomed, even. Savored. His tower of seclusion toppled, his trust rebuilt from the scraps into a garden of possibility. She made him a whole person, and he has shown her the mysteries and wonders of his world in return. 

Those same mysteries and wonders are what often keep him lying awake at night, fear churning in his gut, visions of her broken body and spirit playing through his mind like a film he can't turn off. This is the second and ultimate vulnerability of love, he thinks: the aching awareness of inevitable parting. Maybe she'll fall tomorrow in the line of duty, for his cause. Maybe she'll leave him when she realizes how deeply and truly damaged he really is. Maybe they'll have 40 years together, until they're old and grey. Maybe it will be all his fault. Maybe it won't. The truth, he feels swirling sickly in his stomach, is that someday one of them will go and the other will stay. It is a simple and profound conclusion, all at once. It is the ultimate price of love. 

He grimaces weakly, closes his eyes, runs one large hand through his sleep-mussed hair. He can feel his heart beating, thinks he hears it in his ears over the deafening silence of the snowy morning. Turning his head on the pillow, he opens his eyes again and takes her in: fiery red crests over the top of the blanket, framing sleep-slackened eyebrows and mouth. Her nose whistles softly with each slow breath, and the corner of his mouth pulls up at the unguarded innocence of it all. She looks so peaceful, he thinks. Unburdened. Finally at rest. The sight shakes the weight in his chest and replaces it with something warm, something content. 

They wouldn't beat the odds, he knows that. Nobody gets out of this life alive and, like all things, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully would eventually fade into the aether of time. What he also believes with increasing absoluteness, however, is the peculiar and extraordinary nature of her; she is like wildfire, and a storm raging at sea. She is the smell of rain and dark pine in an ancient forest. She is like the endless dotted stars that dance above him when he stares into the abyss of night sky, and feels it staring back. To him, she is cosmic - something more than this. She is unknowable and tragic and beautiful. He feels like he has loved her for thousands of years, and will love her for thousands more. They are infinite, in different time and body, and he will follow her faithfully and desperately - if she'll have him. 

A deep and weighted sigh rumbles from his chest and he hears her stir again, legs softly shifting the sheets beneath them. 

"Mu'ller?" she mumbled below the blanket, eyes still closed, voice soft and sleep-laden. One hand poked out of her cocoon of warmth, pawed the mattress in search of him, finding his skin and sliding up onto his chest. He practically glowed. 

"It's snowing, Scully," he whispered, eyes crinkling with his smile. God, she's beautiful. 

"That's nice," she managed, already succumbing to sleep again. He turns on his shoulder to face her, nuzzles her jaw with his nose, brushes a kiss on her neck. 

"Yeah," he says into her skin. "Yeah, it is."

He closes his eyes and drifts off to the warmth of her. The snow continued to fall over Alexandria.


End file.
